Reduce Risk and Improve Operability Using Big Data

Older continuous processing units are struggling with tighter requirements around throughput, risk, quality, downtime, maintenance, margins and new capital. How do you continue to maximize your asset base? Recent proven advances in a proprietary big data technology are enabling site teams to solve problems before they become expensive surprises. Imagine an operations team reviewing the daily status. They talk production levels, safety and maintenance plans. The goal is to have a robust operation, yet the team fights a constant battle against operational issues of unclear or unknown causes. The plant systems generate hundreds of thousands of data points every hour that go mostly unused in a typical diagnostic. The magnitude of the risk and reliability associated with these operations can change dynamically without warning, at least until now. The Dynamic Risk Analyzer (DRA) allows operational teams to "see" problems before alarms indicate an issue and within enough time to identify and to prevent shutdown scenarios. This paper will outline how the new DRA technology is actually giving its users insight into their facilities and enabling improved operations.